what goes around comes around

Hey, look, my spinning wheel! Dug out of the closet we shoved it in five years ago when we started working on Autism remediation for J. Because, you see, things that spin are not your friend if your goal is helping your child to be present with you.

But there was a time I was an avid (perhaps rabid!) spinner/fiber enthusiast. Hence the reason we live on a sheep farm, you see. (These things all do make sense when you get right to the heart of matters.)

In any case, yesterday out came the wheel in preparation for teaching my Sheep to Scarf class about spinning next Monday. Like riding a bicycle, I was right back in the spin of things (pun fully intended) in no time. And lo and behold, I love it every bit as much as I did back "in the day". I've been having trouble resisting the urge to spin all of my students' fiber up (and hence fully defeating the class purpose!).

As my kids watched me spinning this morning, both boys got fascinated by the physical aspects of how the wheel works. I pointed all the pieces of the wheel out, how they are connected, and how it makes the yarn twist. Zoo Boy frowned. "I don't get it," he said, "How does the big wheel make the gear go faster?"


I pulled out my drop spindle to show them how spinning without gears works. It's slow, it's laborious, it's moderately frustrating. (I secretly hate drop spindling, but don't tell my students that, I am about to try to get them all enthusiastic about it! Thankfully kids seem to naturally love spinning with a spindle, because it's cost prohibitive to send them all home with wheels!) My boys observed how the spindle could only spin as fast as I could spin it.

Then we moved back to the wheel, and I let them take turns working the treadle while we saw how much faster the gear turned than the wheel. Zoo Boy had more questions about gears.


So, out came the big box of plastic gears. I knew I'd been saving this for a reason! These items, too, went into hiding the same time we began working on banishing autistic obsessions from our house. But something stopped me from chucking them all together, figuring I might be happy I have this collection of gears at some point down the line. This is that point!

I set up a little demo mat with a large gear and a small gear, and let the kids count the number of times the little gear turned as compared to the number of times the big gear turned. "Oh, I get it!" cried Zoo Boy.


And then they spent hours experimenting with various configurations of gears.







J wants to learn to spin on my wheel, and I've promised to teach him. He's been having fun helping me figure out how to balance the wheel, what needs oil, what needs more tension, etc, so that it doesn't make the variety of noisy-old-wheel noises it was making after sitting in storage for so long. Thanks to our collective ingenuity, it's running pretty smooth now.

Zoo Boy just likes hanging out with the wheel. He likes being able to reach out and touch it, feel the smoothness of the wood, the roughness of the freshly spun yarn. He reads and does his pretend play in close proximity to it, and occasionally stops to get his tactile fill of it. And he loves watching me spin and commenting, "I didn't know you are a spinner, Mommy!"

I had forgotten myself. But I am. A spinner.